Optiv’s Jeff Wichman: Have response processes, understand them, and test them.

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Optiv’s Jeff Wichman: Have response processes, understand them, and test them.

Jeff Wichman, the practice director for enterprise incident management at Optiv, says the government is doing a “bang up job if effectively responding to cybe...

Tom Temin

July 14, 2017 12:08 pm

2 min read

Jeff Wichman, the practice director for enterprise incident management at Optiv, says the government is doing a “bang up job if effectively responding to cybersecurity incidents.

The key condition to having that capability, he says, is knowing what lurks in your systems and understanding your processes required to deal with threats.

In short, that amounts to really being prepared. Wichman says that in some ways government is actually ahead of the private sector when it comes to advanced response. In the commercial sector, he says failure begin when organizations lack a full understand of their own processes in responding to an incident. Or they don’t test them adequately, “and that’s when they start to feel the burn.”

Host

Tom Temin

Tom Temin has been reporting on and providing insight to technology markets for more than 30 years. Tom was a long-serving editor-in-chief of Government Computer News and Washington Technology magazines. Tom also contributes a regular column on government information technology.

Guest

Jeff Wichman, Practice Director, Enterprise Incident Management, Optiv

Jeff Wichman is the Practice Director for Optiv’s Enterprise Incident Management practice. Jeff’s role is to provide strategic, financial direction and leadership to the Enterprise Incident Management practice. He also has technical expertise in digital forensics and incident response programs and processes, and provides coaching the Optiv Enterprise Incident Management team.

Mr. Wichman has over 15 years of experience in information security. His experience ranges from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations in a multitude of industries. He is a subject matter expert (SME) in the design, implementation, and testing of incident management programs. He is experienced with incident response related to single crypto-malware incidents up to major corporate compromises involving thousands of systems. Prior to joining Optiv, Mr. Wichman was a senior security engineer for financial services organizations and was responsible for securing corporate networks, responding to security incidents and forensic investigations.